Anna Kamieńska*

Anna Kamieńska (1920—1986) is a Polish poet, translator, writer, and literary critic. Her earliest poems were published when she was just 14 in the Warsaw children’s magazine Płomyczek. During the Nazi occupation she taught in underground village schools. Later she became involved in Warsaw’s literary life, including as a book reviewer for the prestigious monthly magazine Creativity.

She has been described in Polish American Journal as “a major Polish writer, and equal to Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, [who] grew up in the horrors of Nazi occupation and Communism. She wrote 20 collections of poetry. It was after the death of her husband — the poet Jan Śpiewak when she was just 47 — that she embarked on a journey from unbelief through metaphysical wrestlings to faith. This journey may be observed both through her poetry collections, and her two-volume Notebooks.

The following poem is from Astonishments: Selected poems of Anna Kamieńska (Paraclete, 2007) and was translated from Polish by Grażyna Drabik and David Carson.

The Lamp

I write in order to comprehend not to express myself
I don’t grasp anything I’m not ashamed to admit it
sharing this not knowing with a maple leaf
So I turn with questions to words wiser than myself
to things that will endure long after us
I wait to gain wisdom from chance
I expect sense from silence
Perhaps something will suddenly happen
and pulse with hidden truth
like the spirit of the flame in the oil lamp
under which we bowed our heads
when we were very young
and grandmas crossed the bread with a knife
and we believed in everything
So now I yearn for nothing so much
as for that faith

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Anna Kamieńska: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Anna Kamieńska

Anna Kamieńska (1920–1986), like Czeslaw Milosz, lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and the difficult years under communism. Her poetry doesn’t describe the inhumanity of those times, but concentrates on essential, lasting things. Her husband — the poet Jan Śpiewak — died prematurely of cancer in 1967, and left Kamieńska in search of answers. In 1970 she wrote in her notebook, “I was looking for the dead, and I found God.”

During the 1970s the Polish government tried to silence her, and suppress her work, because they saw her as part of the democratic movement. Even so, she has written twenty books of poetry, and many biblical commentaries. In 2007 Paraclete Press released a collection of her poems, translated into English by Grażyna Drabik and David Curson, called Astonishments. This book demonstrates her hard-earned faith, nurtured through honest questioning and doubt, as exemplified in the following poems.

A Prayer

Out of a spark and out of dust make me again
again plant trees in my paradise
once more give me the sky over my head

So I could deny You with my reason
call you forth with all my tears
find You like love with my lips

Lack Of Faith

Yes
even when I don’t believe
there is a place in me
inaccessible to unbelief
a patch of wild grace
a stubborn preserve
impenetrable
pain untouched sleeping in the body
music that builds its nest in silence

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Anna Kamieńska: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca